At the Crossroads of the Mediterranean: Rethinking trade and mercantile networks in 19th century Aleppo. It has been assumed until recently that trade in the Ottoman Empire was in the hands of the Europeans ever since Mehmet the Conqueror renewed trading rights of the Genoese of Galata following the fall of Constantinople. The willingness of the Ottoman government to offer privileges to European merchants, in the form of lower tariffs and exemptions of certain duties, often put the local merchants at a disadvantage and led to the belief that trade was almost exclusively in the hands of the European merchants. By the nineteenth century these privileges were increased considerably through pressure put upon the Ottoman government by the European powers and were referred to as the capitulations. In addition to these capitulations, chartered trading companies such as the English Levant Company and the Dutch VOC established factories and consular networks in commercial cities like Aleppo and Izmir (smyrna) to look after the interests of the merchants. Both the capitulations and the existence of the representatives of these companies served to increase the power of the merchants and gave rise to the perception that they dominated trade in the Empire. This paper will argue that trade was not solely the privilege of the European merchants and the trading companies as previously thought. Using the example of the Ghantouz Coubbè family, who were a merchant family from Aleppo in the 19th century, I will prove that the flow of trade went both ways. Families such as the Coubbe’s were able to not only migrate, but also set up businesses and subsiduary branches in different European cities and later return to Aleppo to continue to conduct their business from there. In addition, they set up a shipping company, which facilitated not only the transportation of their own merchandise, but also that of the European traders as well, thus playing an important role in the economy of the Ottoman Empire. The Ghantouz Coubbè family were not alone in their trading endeavors outside the Ottoman Empire. Using the archives from the Venetian / Italian consulate in Aleppo plus the family archives, I will complicate the notion that there was a hegemonic control of trade in the Mediterranean by the European merchants. Rather, this paper will demonstrate that there were multiple actors who all took part in commerce across the Ottoman Empire and the

The prominent Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm has famously described the mid-nineteenth century as “the age of capital.” This paper starts from the premise that it was also the age of market standardization. Focusing on Egypt during the 1850s-70s, the paper seeks to capture the dynamics of this process of standardization. Specifically, it searches for instances of this process in merchant court records as well as in actual business correspondence. The nineteenth-century Ottoman world, including Egypt, was the site of sweeping efforts to introduce codified laws and rationalize court operations. In the realm of commerce, this movement took the form of a seemingly comprehensive commercial-legal infrastructure, including novel market regulations, commercial laws and legal institutions. Notably, new standard mechanisms meant to resolve cases of insolvency were put in place. Furthermore, merchants who wished (or needed) to gain access to this increasingly litigious commercial realm standardized their record keeping practices making them legible for auditors and court officials. The significance of their records is best exemplified by the fact that they came to constitute admissible legal evidence in merchant courts, at times even overriding other forms of evidence, such as oral testimony. This paper argues that behind this veneer of uniformity, the process of market standardization was uneven and multi-directional (rather than linear). Specifically, it shows two unrelated instances of these uneven qualities. First, it relies on merchant court records from mid-nineteenth century Cairo to show the coexistence of and tension between two conflicting ideas about the problem of imprisoned debtors. In spite of the apparent comprehensiveness of the legislation, insolvent merchants continued to pose a problem to this commercial-legal infrastructure, which dealt with them at once as criminals who ought to be punished, and as victims who deserved forgiveness if not help. Second, it explores a set of private business correspondence and other related records from an Alexandria-based merchant to show how market-related decisions were embedded in a larger social context in which personal relations and political developments were crucial.

The Gümü?gerdan Family were one of the most powerful corbaci merchant and manufacturer families in the Plovdiv region during the mid-nineteenth century in the Ottoman Empire. Although their main craft was the manufacturing and production of coarse wool cloth (aba) mainly for the Ottoman army, their activities varied from tax collection to trade and guild management. By blending trade, tax collection and industry they increased their economic and political power in various regions of Southern Bulgaria. In doing so, Gümü?gerdans held a reputation as Bulgaria’s best- known traders, landowners, commissionaires, and head of the government chancery office, manufacturers and factory owners. They established intertwined relations with the Ottoman administration as well as these powerful provincial actors. They immigrated to Greece after Bulgaria gained its independence in 1878. This paper examines the Gümü?gerdan family with a specific concentration on their intertwined relations with the state officials, local elites (corbacis), tax farmers, as well as with other traders. Through the analysis of the activities of this powerful provincial actors such as their involvement in tax farming, manufacturing and guild management by utilizing previously unexamined archival materials from the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives in Istanbul, Turkey, I aim to delineate the networks between tax collectors, merchants, guilds and provincial notables during the 19th century in the Ottoman Balkans and highlight the regional differences in terms of the state’s relations with powerful provincial actors during that period. Through such an analysis of specific cases in which various members of Gümü?gerdan family were involved, I aim to show the intertwined relationships such as alliances between money lenders, guild masters, state officials and tax collectors. Then, I further argue that these alliances between the Gümü?gerdan family and state officials, tax collectors and guild masters were not permanent. The significance of such an analysis lies on the scarcity of the studies on Balkan merchants and the networks they established with powerful provincial actors. The additional significance of this study is that it gives the opportunity to make further comparisons with other powerful merchants, tax collectors or provincial elites for future research.